Hello all

i've been in to php for about a year now, and something is still buging me, i can not find any explanation on the net as how does asigning variables with -> work. i obviously cant search google as -> does not return any results that would help me.

i can code everything without that, but i would still like to know where can it be used, and how...

thank you

Check out classes and the PHP OO Pattern to get a grasp of them

-> works the same as . in java and c++. Say you have a class foo and within that class you have a method bar, you would have to use the -> operator to access that method.

PHP Code:

<?php
class Foo
{
    function bar()
    {
       echo 'foobar';
    }
}

$foo = new Foo;
$x->bar();
?>

You also use -> to access any public member variables of a class.

EDIT:
Whenever I edit code I've posted I keep getting asterisks inserted that I cannot remove for some reason. Anyone else have this problem?

Matt I took out the asterisks and replaced them with spaces. I'm guessing your code was tabbed and I guess that somehow gets turned into asterisks. I think only spaces will work, but don't hold me to that.

thank you very much, you've both been very helpfull, i come from a computer science school so object oriented programing is not new to me, but never got into using it with php... so once more, thank you for pointing me in the right direction

btw, i'd like to say that my life has gotten a whole lot easier and more fun since two days ago when i discovered this forum

To tag onto what Matt said - the -> is identifying the method (a.k.a. function) or var (a.k.a. variable) of an object (a.k.a. class).

The -> identifier can be replaced with ::

I was never comfortable using :: in place of -> in php. In c++ :: is used for scoping (identifying a namespace). I read that when php 6 is released \ will be the operator for namespaces so that will be even more confusing for me.